Gone are the days of leads booking their own consultations and showing up ready to buy! Now, it’s best to think of prospects as new born babies – they need immediate attention and constant nurturing!
Studies have shown that mice will pick a warm fuzzy object to cuddle instead of a cold food distributing tube. What’s this got to do with marketing and sales? People are more aware of automations, so you need human driven contact. This means phone calls!
As someone who would gladly never have another phone call in his life, and would happily share memes, gifs and TikToks to communicate, I understand your reluctance to make phone calls. Particularly when you most likely won’t get an answer the first time you call. Phone calls give a sense of importance and urgency that emails and text messages don’t. The data also shows that phone calls and texts have a higher response rate than either phone calls or text.
The ideal contact schedule should be:
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Call immediately, within 5 minutes. Send a text (WhatsApp if in Europe) if no answer.
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Call again within 2 hours. Send an email.
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Day 2: Call again (morning and afternoon). Send one text message.
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Day 3: Call again (afternoon/evening). Send an email.
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Day 4-7: One call per day, alternating each day with an SMS and email.
*Don’t get too hung up on ideal times. The aim is to try at different times as you don’t know when the prospect is ready to take a call.
If this sounds like an excessive amount to you, I’d like to share a story of an ideal client who wanted to sign her husband up to my gym. When she gave me his number, she laughed and said “he’s done for now, you won’t stop calling!” She then explained that I called 8 times before she picked up. Two other ideal clients then chimed in and mentioned I kept calling. I asked why she didn’t answer the call and she said “I wasn’t ready to talk to you! “ All three of these members have referred in other family members to join.
Starting off, if you’re not used to calling and texting, please make one call a day and send one text or email a day for three days to try reach them.
It’s important to remember that if you do everything right, you will still get ~50% attrition from cold paid leads. It’s the type of thing that makes gym owners want to slam their head into a brick wall, but we don’t recommend that because concussions are super bad for you.